Wideband MIMO Systems: Signal Design for Transmit Beampattern Synthesis

The usage of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems such as a MIMO radar allows the array elements to transmit different waveforms freely. This waveform diversity can lead to flexible transmit beampattern synthesis, which is useful in many applications such as radar/sonar and biomedical imaging. In the past literature most attention was paid to receive beampattern design due to the stringent constraints on waveforms in the transmit beampattern case. Recently progress has been made on MIMO transmit beampattern synthesis but mainly only for narrowband signals. In this paper we propose a new approach that can be used to efficiently synthesize MIMO waveforms in order to match a given wideband transmit beampattern, i.e., to match a transmit energy distribution in both space and frequency. The synthesized waveforms satisfy the unit-modulus or low peak-to-average power ratio (PAR) constraints that are highly desirable in practice. Several examples are provided to investigate the performance of the proposed approach.